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The Holy Spirit leads the community to holy oneness

October 4, 2024
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Daily Scripture

Ephesians 4:1-6

1 Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God. 2 Conduct yourselves with all humility, gentleness, and patience. Accept each other with love, 3 and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. 4 You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 and one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.

Daily Reflection & Prayer

First century or twenty-first, every group deals with tension and conflict for one simple reason: we are different. Today’s passage didn’t ignore differences (cf. Ephesians 4:11-13). It did say that as different as we are, we can find and preserve “the unity of the Spirit.” It listed no fewer than seven “ones” that unite God’s people, and then ended in verse 6 with three “alls.” Unity isn’t an optional convenience achieved by human effort, but an essential gift from God through the Holy Spirit.

  • Can you see the ways that the differences between people, when valued and respected, bring depth and strength (even when they pose challenges)? How can valuing and celebrating the strength that grows from differences help to keep you from building relationship-destroying walls of separation? The passage said one key to helping each other grow is “speaking the truth in love.” Which do you find harder with others: speaking the truth at all, or doing so in love?
  • It takes “effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit leads, not forces. We read about “suppressing the Spirit;” and you can “brush off” Spirit-inspired messages (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:19-20). Destroying unity makes the Spirit “unhappy” (cf. Ephesians 4:29-31). “The Spirit is unhappy when believers speak destructive words about others and when people divide against one another.” * How can you value and preserve the Holy Spirit’s gift of unity in all your contacts?
Prayer

Holy Spirit, make me the kind of person who always speaks the truth, but who only speaks it in love. Guide me to listen in that spirit as well as speak, to preserve your precious gift of unity. Amen.

GPS Insights

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Lauren Cook

Lauren Cook serves as the Entry Points Program Director at Resurrection. She is a self-proclaimed foodie, a bookworm, and is always planning her next trip. She has the sweetest (and sassiest) daughter, Carolina Rae, a rockstar husband, Austin, and a cutie pup named Thunder. She loves connecting with others so let her know the best place you've ever eaten, best book you've ever read, or best place you've ever been!

 

Dear friends,
I am so glad to be with you again and yet again. God is speaking not through whispers but through shouts with today’s passage.

Four years ago, I got my master’s degree from Baker University in Organizational Leadership. This was a pretty new degree option at the time, and I didn’t know anyone else that had pursued this degree, but I felt called toward it. While I had one statistics class, most of the coursework was around organizational health, change management, and conflict management. At the time, I found the work deeply meaningful and intriguing, I felt like I learned a lot and was able to engage in incredible conversations and experiences. However, it all felt sort of “out there”; it felt like helpful information for some day but not really in the immediate presence.

Fast forward to September 2024.

The last few years have been, if not the most disruptive, then at least the most challenging in terms of rapid change and conflict that I’ve experienced thus far. I think we have all experienced tremendous change in our personal lives, our work lives, in our neighborhoods and schools and even our coffee shops. In the last two weeks alone, I was a part of a leadership gathering in Dallas, Texas that focused almost solely on organizational health and individual health, specifically around conflict, and I began engaging in a book study and conversations around these same things with my own circles.

Conflict isn’t new but it’s more consistent, pervasive, and invasive. I see conflict almost everywhere I look. Here’s the interesting thing about conflict: conflict isn’t a bad word. It isn’t a bad thing. Conflict is necessary for growth, innovation, learning, and creativity. Conflict stems from passion. Conflict simply occurs when two or more people disagree about an idea (or even just a part of an idea) which happens literally all the time. What makes conflict so debilitating is when it we make conflict about a person instead of a problem. When we say things to hurt or tear down our co-worker, neighbor, partner or friend instead of leading with curiosity and wonder about a situation or idea. When we focus so minutely on our differences and forget the many things that we share.

God made each and every one of us in his image, and He calls each and every one of us beloved. What might it look like for you to search for the belovedness in your neighbor instead of their political opinion or their lawncare techniques? What might it look like to see the belovedness in your co-worker instead of focusing on their different approach to a strategy? What might it look like to call out the belovedness in everyone we encounter and remind all of us of whose we really are? Let’s dive into conflict as beloved children of God so that we can grow together, not apart.

P.S. Want to learn about how to engage in conflict in more constructive ways? Come to our Do Unto Others workshops, starting this Wednesday, October 9!

© 2024 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References

* Timothy G. Gombis, study note on Ephesians 4:30 in The CEB Study Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013, p. 369 NT.